Author: Amara

Stories of Women and the Past: International Women’s Day 2024

Posted on by Amara
Recording of Stories of Women and the Past, a full day workshop at the Society of Antiquaries, 8 March 2024

We had a great time at the Society of Antiquaries on 8 March, welcoming a fantastic range of speakers to the Society for our final public engagement event of the project, a full day workshop “Stories of Women and the Past”.

This event was recorded, and you can now watch it via the Society of Antiquaries YouTube account.

Approximate timecodes for the talks are as follows:

1.22 | Introduction and Housekeeping (Amara Thornton, Beyond Notability)

6.54 | STORY PERFORMANCE: Changing Times – Charlotte Stopes (Vanessa Woolf):

23.18 | AI and Women on the Edge of the Archive (Catherine Clarke, Institute of HIstorical Research)

38.13 | 19th Century Bloomsbury Women who Changed our Lives (Julia Pascal, Pascal Theatre Co.)

51.00 | Q&A (Catherine and Julia)

1.24.02 | STORY PERFORMANCE: Five Stones for Alice – Alice Gomme (Vanessa Woolf):

1.37.00 | Illuminating Knowledge (Kath Van Uytrecht and Katy Drake)

1.52.22 | “Walking Images” – Caribbean Social Forum (Pamela Franklin, Caribbean Social Forum)

2.07.53 | Q&A (Kath & Pamela)

3.15.11 | STORY PERFORMANCE: Wall of Stories – Jessie Mothersole & Elizabeth Hodgson (Vanessa Woolf)

3.27.54 | Approaching the Goddess – Grimes Graves & Archaeological Search for Female Devine (Jennifer Wexler, English Heritage)

3.48.00 | Rome Play – Reimagining history and myth for Children (author Marie Basting in conversation with Debbie Challis)

4.01.49 | Q&A (Marie and Jennifer)

4.30.00 | STORY PERFORMANCE: Island Song – Edith Blake (Vanessa Woolf)

4.43.21 | Shebmut: the search for missing mummy stories (Emma Anderson & Bryony Renshaw, The Silk Museum, Macclesfield)

5.04.54 | Historical Costumes and Storytelling (Jo Badger in conversation with Debbie Challis)

5.28.57 | Q&A (Emma, Bryony and Jo)

5.50.00 | Vanessa and Amara on creating the stories for Beyond Notability, in coversation with Katherine

Vanessa has written a series of posts her personal website sharing some of the process of creating the stories:

On the story for Edith Blake – https://londondreamtime.com/beyond-notability-edith-blake/

On the story for Alice Gomme – https://londondreamtime.com/beyond-notability-alice-gomme/

On the story for Jessie Mothersole and Elizabeth Hodgson – https://londondreamtime.com/beyond-notability-hadrians-wall/

On the story for Charlotte Stopes – https://londondreamtime.com/beyond-notability-charlotte-stopes/

And her reflection on our International Women’s Day workshop is here: https://londondreamtime.com/international-womens-day-at-the-society-of-antiquities/

On Arabel Moulton-Barrett

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator)

I first came across “Miss Moulton Barrett” in the summer of 2020 as I started exploring the history of archaeology in the Caribbean. Her name was mentioned in connection to a late 19th century excavation at an estate called Retreat or Retreat Pen(n) in St Ann’s, Jamaica. Retreat had been owned by a “Mr Moulton Barrett” and “Miss Moulton Barrett” had conducted excavations there. I dug around for more information (online, it was during lockdown). I happened upon a digitised and text-searchable copy of Jeanette Marks’ 1938 book The Family of the Barrett: a colonial Romance, charting the family history of famous Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. A sentence in this book stopped me in my tracks:

“[…] there was born to Charles John [Moulton Barrett, EBB’s brother] by a woman of colour, a child.” (p 612)

Another child followed a few years later. Two daughters, Eva and Arabel, both born to Charles John Moulton Barrett and Elizabeth Barrett. Both Eva and Arabel grew up at Retreat in the late 19th century. These two girls were the Mixed-heritage Jamaican nieces of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

I wasn’t sure whether Eva or Arabel was the “Miss Moulton-Barrett” of the archaeological reports I’d been looking at. But as I pursued my enquiries, I contacted the staff of Eton College Collections where the Moulton-Barrett family papers are held. They informed me that the “Miss Moulton Barrett” I was investigating was most likely Arabel – in 1880 Eva married John Casserly (listed on their marriage certificate as a planter living at Oxford Estate, Trelawny). Even more thrillingly, in looking through the archive on my enquiry the Eton College Collections staff had discovered six letters (written from Jamaica by Arabel (“Bel”) Moulton-Barrett to a relative (Edward F. Moulton Barrett, or “Edward of Albion” as she addresses him). The letters held at Eton College were written between 1945 and 1953.  Arabel Moulton-Barrett was by then a very elderly woman, and one of Jamaica’s most celebrated women poets.

In the 1890s, during an explosion of archaeological work in Jamaica, the Jamaica Gleaner published a report on the discoveries “Miss Moulton-Barrett” had made during her informal excavations at Retreat Pen. This report included a short description in her own words. By this time, she had loaned some of the artefacts discovered for display in a well-publicised exhibition on Jamaica’s pre-Columbian past, held in late 1895 at the Institute of Jamaica.

We added “Miss Moulton Barrett” to our database early in the Beyond Notability project (find her entry here). Her engagement in archaeology reflects a wider colonial context which we are mapping (including women with ancestors appearing in the Legacies of British Slaveownership database, listed here). But Arabel’s story and her letters are also particularly intriguing for me personally, as a Mixed-heritage researcher with close family ties to the Caribbean. 

Arabel Moulton-Barrett’s engagements with archaeology also highlight an important element of the context of women’s work in archaeology, history and heritage in Britain: empire. As a team, we are continuing to discuss how best to reflect and incorporate this imperial context into the database that forms a key part of our research project.  Through the project we want our database to be a framework and a model for situating these historic engagements with archaeology, history and heritage in Britain (as we know it today) alongside similar work happening within the British empire broadly conceived.

The paragraphs that follow explore three aspects of Arabel Moulton-Barrett’s story: her family background, the context of her archaeological work (assuming that Arabel Moulton-Barrett is the same person as “Miss Moulton Barrett”), and her later life. I refer to the letters held by Eton College throughout the piece. Written at the end of her life, when she was reflecting on her childhood and her childhood home, they are a poignant insight into her memories. While she doesn’t discuss her archaeological work explicitly in the letters, she does reveal the special place Retreat Pen, her childhood home, held in her heart.

The Family

The Barrett family had been associated with Jamaica since the 18th century, holding plantations across several parishes, including St Ann’s and Trelawny. While some members of the family resided in Jamaica others like Arabel Moulton-Barrett’s paternal grandfather Edward Barrett, lived in Britain. Edward Barrett received thousands of pounds worth of compensation after the abolition of slavery. His son Charles John (known within the family as “Storm”), had moved from Britain to Jamaica to manage Barrett estates as a resident proprietor. These estates included Retreat Pen, “The Retreat”, the plantation between Brown’s Town, St Ann’s and Stewart Town, Trelawny. Arabel’s mother Elizabeth Barrett was herself a Mixed-heritage woman. Arabel noted in a letter (2 Feb 1945) that Elizabeth’s father was Charles John’s “uncle Sam”, making Elizabeth and Charles John cousins.  Arabel did not mention the name of her maternal grandmother, though she appears to have known her.

In the six letters held at Eton, Arabel discussed her parents’ relationship in some detail. She emphasised their love for each other and mourned the fact that they had been prevented from marrying. Almost defiantly she wrote

“I consider myself as more truly born of wedded parents than any other woman whose mother bears a wedding ring”

“Bel” Moulton-Barrett to “Edward of Albion” 2 February 1945

Arabel revealed that Charles John gave Elizabeth a house and land in Stewart Town, Trelawny, bordering St Ann’s to the west. She noted that Elizabeth had acquired an education on her own, and “had a nice little library – theology, travel, autobiography & poetry were all represented.” (2 Feb 1945) 

Arabel and her sister Eva were brought up by Charles John at Retreat Pen – “my beloved home” Arabel called it (7 March 1956). Of Charles John’s parenting Arabel stated

“He did the right and honourable thing acknowledging his two little daughters. No father could have done more than he did […]”

“Bel” Moulton-Barrett to “Edward of Albion” 2 February 1945

According to Jeanette Marks the girls were educated in France. Charles John, Eva and Arabel travelled to Britain in 1867; Arabel recalled her visit to her uncle by marriage Robert Browning at his home in London in one letter, describing his voice as “Deep – rich – full” (2 Dec 1952). By the 1870s financial disaster loomed. Charles John’s brother Septimus was heavily in debt. Arabel recounted how Charles John spent all of his money and sold all the family properties clearing Septimus’s debt to save the Barrett name (30 Apr 1950). According to the Jamaica National Heritage Trust’s 2019 Archaeological Impact Assessment, Retreat Pen was sold in 1893. The only part of the estate that was not sold was the burial ground – this, Arabel noted in a letter, “still belongs to me.” (5 April 1950)

Arabel Moulton-Barrett’s complex family history encapsulates both the context of sexual exploitation of Black and Mixed-heritage women by White planters during the era of slavery, and the lives of the resulting Mixed-heritage population in the period after slavery. Some of these Mixed-heritage descendants, including Arabel, led relatively comfortable lives with the time to devote to intellectual pursuits.

Archaeology, Tourism and Jamaica

It is not clear exactly when Arabel Moulton-Barrett undertook her investigations of the mounds at Retreat, though it took place before the estate’s sale in 1893. By this time interest in Jamaica’s pre-Columbian past had intensified, tied to the colonial government’s plans for increasing tourism to the island.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, Jamaica had as its Governor one Henry Blake, who had joined the colonial service from a post in the Irish Constabulary. Before coming to Jamaica, he had been Governor in the Bahamas and (briefly) Newfoundland. Henry Blake was married to Edith Bernal Osborne, an artist and writer with a deep interest in archaeology (find her entry in our database here).

As Governor, Henry Blake wanted to put Jamaica on the map, drawing tourism and other development opportunities to the island. He worked to facilitate a large-scale international exhibition held in Jamaica in 1891. Edith Blake also took part in this work. In addition, she was increasing her own collection of Caribbean antiquities, writing and publishing on the history and archaeology of the Caribbean, and conducting her own explorations of sites.

The Blakes were involved in the Institute of Jamaica, a learned society which by the mid-1890s had begun to encourage and lead formal archaeological investigations . In 1895, Institute of Jamaica curator J. E. Duerden organised the “Anthropological Exhibition”, borrowing artefacts from collectors in Jamaica and beyond for the display. In a volume of the Institute’s Journal Duerden recorded the efforts of these resident collectors and excavators, including Edith Blake and Arabel Moulton-Barrett.

Duerden’s report makes clear that Arabel Moulton Barrett’s exploration at Retreat Pen centred around two hills connected by a ridge. These had once been fields enslaved workers had farmed for their sustenance – among them, possibly, Arabel’s maternal ancestors. In her notes on the work, published in the Gleaner and reprinted in Duerden’s report, Arabel recorded that the ridge featured small mounds where pieces of pottery described in the Gleaner as “of the same type as the aboriginal examples obtained elsewhere”, the bones of coneys (a mammal similar to a rat), and pieces of shell were recovered at and just below surface level. It would probably have been estate workers, under Arabel’s direction, who dug below the surface on the ridge. The Institute of Jamaica subsequently organised further investigations of the site, and Duerden reported that the previous cultivation of this area by enslaved people had resulted in damage to the mounds in question. It is entirely possible that the enslaved population working in the fields before Arabel’s explorations had themselves discovered further evidence of Indigenous life. A West India Company soldier who collected ancient stone tools in Falmouth, Jamaica in the 1860s noted in a report that formerly enslaved people had first recovered many of these tools.

Later Life: Arabel, the Published Poet

The 1893 sale of Retreat Pen seems to have ended Arabel Moulton-Barrett’s archaeological investigations. Perhaps, as she no longer had access to the family property, there was no opportunity for her to continue her interests. And her father’s impoverished circumstances must have played some part. She stoically references her long-standing financial worries, which were eased to some degree by her father’s brothers after his death.  “I have had to work hard all my life” she noted “but work is good for body and mind.” (30 April 1950). By 1913 she was living in Kingston, and it was there that she won first prize in a poetry competition. Her poetic response to the competition’s set question, “If I Were Governor”, was printed in the Gleaner in December 1913.

Between 1919 and 1925 three of Arabel’s short stories were published in The Catholic World. During the 1920s, she became more involved in the literary scene in Jamaica, and her work was included in the 1929 anthology Voices from Summerland, published in London but representing the work of the Jamaica branch of the Empire Poetry League. She continued to be a part of the Jamaican poetry league through the 1930s and 1940s, her poems published in League “Year Book” anthologies of 1940 and 1941, alongside the verses of many others, including Tom Redcam, Astley Clerk, Lena Kent and Constance Hollar. Her poem “The Lost Mate” (published in Voices from Summerland) features in a 1950 Anthology of the poetry of the West Indies.

Impoverished and suffering with loss of vision towards the end of her life, she records in a letter in the Eton collection (30 Apr 1950) that a group of writers had clubbed together to send her badly needed funds. She died soon after the letter was written. I hope she is buried in the family burial plot at Retreat as she wished, “close to my beloved father” (5 April 1950).

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Stephie Coane, Michael Meredith and Laura Carnelos, Katherine Harloe and Debbie Challis. Text of Arabel Moulton-Barrett letters reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.

References/Further Reading

Cuming, H. Syer. 1868. Proceedings of the British Archaeological Association. Journal of the British Archaeological Association 24 (4): 391-404.

Duerden, J. E. 1896. Jamaican Anthropology. Discovery of Aboriginal Shell Mounds in St Ann and St James. Jamaica Gleaner, 21 February, p 4.

Duerden, J. E. 1897. Aboriginal Indian Remains in Jamaica. Journal of the Institute of Jamaica  2(4).

Green, Cecilia A, 2006. Hierarchies of Whiteness in the Geographies of Empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barretts of Jamaica. New West Indian Guide 80 (1/2), 5-43.

Institute of Jamaica, 1896. Annual Report on the Institute of Jamaica for the year ended  31st  March, 1896. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica.

Jamaica Gleaner, 1913. ‘If I Were Governor.’ An Interesting Subject that attracted a good many competitors: Miss Arabel Moulton Barrett Secures First Prize. 13 December, p 7.

Jamaica National Heritage Trust Archaeological Division, 2019. Archaeological Impact Assessment, p 35.

Marks, Jeannette Augustus, 1938. The Family of the Barrett: A Colonial Romance. New York: The Macmillan Company.

McFarlane, J. E. Clare, 1945. The Challenge of Our Time: A Series of Essays and Addresses. Kingston, Jamaica: New Dawn Press.

Modest, Wayne, 2018. ‘A Period of Exhibitions’: World’s Fairs, Museums, and the Labouring Black Body in Jamaica. In Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest (Eds.). Victorian Jamaica. (pp. 523-550). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Moulton-Barrett, Arabel, 1919. ‘Melia. Catholic World, CVIII, 517-525.

Moulton-Barrett, Arabel, 1920. The Little Brown Bird. Catholic World, CX, 29-36.

Moulton-Barrett, Arabel, 1925. The Star-Child. Catholic World, 228-236.

Moulton-Barrett, Arabel, 6 letters to Lt Col E. F. Moulton Barrett, 1945-1953. MS 681 01 02 03: Eton College Collections.

Poetry League of Jamaica, 1940. Year Book of the Poetry League of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: New Dawn Press.

Poetry League of Jamaica, 1941. Year Book of the Poetry League of Jamaica. Kingston, Jamaica: New Dawn Press.

#IWD23BeyondNotables

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator)

On 8 March 2023, the Beyond Notability team and a some keen Wikidata editors braved the snowy weather for the International Women’s Day editathon at the Society of Antiquaries. The introductory talks were in the ground floor Meeting Room, which, as I discovered about 5 minutes before we began, contains a 15th-century wooden painted panel that once hung in Baston House, the childhood home of Elizabeth Branson, one of the women in our database. Branson sent the panels for exhibition at the Society in 1880 and donated them to the Society subsequently – both exhibition and donation are recorded in the Society’s minute books (and included in her entry on our database). As I mentioned briefly in my introduction it was a fitting location, therefore, for the start of our day!

James followed my short introduction to the project and the programme for the day with training on Wikidata editing. He used the Wikidata item for politician and former Speaker of the House of Commons Betty Boothroyd, who died late last month, to talk through creating and augmenting Wikidata. Both my introduction and James’s training were recorded, and are now available on the Society of Antiquaries YouTube account https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXLDFsIEMz8.

Katy Drake introducing “Illuminating Knowledge” (2023) the print she has created with Kath Van Uytrecht. Photo: A. Thornton, 8 March 2023.

We then reconvened in the Library. Before editing began in earnest, artist Katy Drake gave a brief speech to introduce a new artwork hanging in the Society’s Library, which she has produced with artist Kath Van Uytrecht. It is a large print, inspired by the women included in the Beyond Notability database. Katy and Kath travelled to Sweden to create the print.

Katy has very kindly contributed some explanatory text: “Illuminating Knowledge” is a collaborative print re-imagining the Lamp of Knowledge, a 14th century bronze Sabbath lamp that is the emblem of the Society of Antiquaries London. Kath and Katy have included 164 shapes inspired by clay Roman oil lamps to represent the women associated with the Society from 1870 -1950. Rather than a single lamp emanating from one source, the lamps represent the network of women and the importance of their contributions. By representing each individual they give voice to women’s work previously overlooked. 

Editing commenced after Katy’s short talk, and our attendees drew on a selection of relevant texts which we had pulled together from the Society’s Library to begin augmenting Wikidata. All in all it was a most enjoyable and productive day, despite the weather.

If you weren’t able to make the event, not to worry! You can get involved in editing Wikidata to add women in our database at any time – just view the training session linked above and visit our Wiki project page to get started.

Introducing our International Women’s Day 2023 Wiki editathon

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

We’re gearing up for our second International Women’s Day event next month. This will be a Wiki editathon, held both in person and online (book here!) at the Society of Antiquaries of London on 8th March 2023.

Following on from our collaborative Wiki editathon in December with the Victoria County History and the Women’s Classical Committee, we’re encouraging you to dive into our data once more and help us increase representation on Wikipedia and Wikidata of women active in archaeology, history and heritage. This time, we’re focusing on women who have entries in our database. We’ve built a project page on Wikipedia so we can see how Wikipedia and Wikidata entries for the women in our database grow and develop.

At present, we have over 500 women in the database. Some of them, like Ella Sophia Armitage, are already on Wikipedia and Wikidata. Others, like Sigridr Magnusson, are currently only on Wikidata. Many more, like Margaret Sefton-Jones, are not currently on either Wikipedia or Wikidata.

500 is a rather large number, so we thought we’d make things a bit easier by pulling together some smaller lists. These represent different areas of our database, different places, different activities, and different subjects.

Are you interested in folklore? Here is our list of women who were affiliated with the Folklore Society!

How about women who were freelance lecturers? Here is our list.

Or women who took part in excavations at Colchester? Another list!

And here is our list of women who were exhibiting a broad range of works in a variety of venues!

There’s something for everyone, we hope. So join us on 8th March – we look forward to seeing you there. If you want to take part online, we’re encouraging people working on Wikidata to take part from 8 March until the end of the month, as it is Women’s History Month.

Women of the VCH Wiki edit-a-thon

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability Project)

The Beyond Notability project is collaborating with the Victoria County History and the Women’s Classical Committee for an online Wiki editathon on 15 December. Since its foundation the Victoria County History has employed women as researchers and writers of these important county-level histories. Some of the women working for the VCH are already represented on Wikipedia and Wikidata, but many of them are not.

Attendees of the Wiki editathon will be adding women VCH contributors to Wikidata and Wikipedia, and augmenting entries for women who are already included to reflect their association with the VCH.

There are 21 women who contributed to the VCH currently included in our Beyond Notability database:

Of these 12 (Graham, Taylor, Armitage, Sellers, Bateson, Chapman, Harris, Wood, O’Neil, Stokes, Toynbee and Lobel) are on Wikidata, and 9 on Wikipedia (Graham, Taylor, Armitage, Sellers, Bateson, Wood, O’Neil, Stokes, and Lobel).

The Women’s Classical Committee has been working on adding women working in classics (broadly conceived) to Wikipedia in monthly editathons. There were 5 women involved in writing about Romano-British archaeology for the Victoria County History:

  • Charlotte Margaret Calthrop  – Romano-British Berkshire
  • Sophie Shilleto Smith – Romano-British Buckinghamshire
  • Edith Murray Keate – Romano-British Leicestershire (co-authored with William Page), Rutland (co-authored with HB Walters), Staffordshire (with Page)
  • Margerie Venables Taylor – Romano British Huntingdonshire, Kent (with Francis John Haverfield), Oxford, Shropshire (with Haverfield)
  • Ella Sophia Armitage – Ancient Earthworks for Yorkshire 1 (co-authored with Donald Montgomerie, this includes Romano-British Earthworks)

Of these, 3 are on our database (Keate, Taylor and Armitage), but only Taylor and Armitage are represented on Wikipedia and Wikidata.

15 December 2022: Editathon Programme

Purpose of event

  • Create, improve and enrich Wikidata and Wikipedia entries for women connected to the Victoria County History project
  • Introduce attendees to editing Wikipedia and Wikidata.
  • Provide a supportive environment for learning and sharing.

Goals

  • Create/augment Wikidata/Wikidata entries for women contributors to the VCH
    • If extant, are Wikidata/Wikipedia entries tidy? And do the links work?
    • HARDER Are there missing links to key identifiers (ie WorldCat, Archaeology Data Service) in Wikidata entries.
    • HARDER use “contributed to creative work” property to add VCH work to women’s entries as in this one for Mary Bateson (see her contributing to the DNB) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6779021.
  • ONE PERSON TASK Augment VCH entry on Wikipedia to clarify staffing structure, including work of contributors as well as editors
  • Use Beyond Notability database as a trusted source for referencing in Wikidata/Wikipedia entries
Beyond-Notability-Edit-a-thon-for-upload-sourceDownload

Event Plan

3-3.20 Intro talks

3-3.05 Brief welcome (Amara)

3.05-3.10 Intro to VCH (Adam)

3.10-3.15 Intro to BN (James)

3.15-3.20 Intro to WCC (Victoria)

3.20-4.30 Training & Editing

Training on Wikipedia editing (Victoria)

Training on Wikidata editing (James)

Editing

Further Reading/References

Link to VCH Volumes online (not all volumes are available for all counties): https://www.history.ac.uk/research/victoria-county-history/county-histories-progress

Beckett, John, 2011. Writing Hampshire’s History: The Victoria County History 1899-1914, Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club Archaeological Society 66.

Chapman, Adam and Townsend, Mike, 2022. Bringing the VCH Past to the Wikipedia Present. IHR Blog.

Elrington, CR (Ed.), 1990. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: General Introduction Supplement 1970-1990 (Oxford University Press).

Pugh, Ralph (Ed.), 1970. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: General Introduction (Oxford University Press).

Acknowledgements:

Special thanks to Adam Chapman, Victoria Leonard, James Baker, Shani Evenstein-Sigalov.

Modelling Excavations with Wikibase

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator)

A fair few women in our database were involved in excavation. Their work spans a spectrum between informal digging, directed by one person who may or may not be ‘trained’, to a larger scale affair organised by multiple groups such as local excavation committees, learned societies, training institutions, and/or universities; including both paid and volunteer labour; and supported financially by public subscription, patronage, grants, or a combination of the lot. In order to indicate effectively both the potential complexity of archaeological sites in terms of staffing, and to provide ways to document the full range of ‘work’ on site, we have come up with a model for representing excavations as organisations.

James’s early handwritten first draft of our excavations model, Feb 2022.

We have two main properties that (at the moment) serve as the gateway to our excavation model: [member of excavation during archaeological field work] and [director of archaeological fieldwork]. The first excavation we modelled using these properties was the dig that took place over multiple seasons in the 1930s in Colchester. We used the excavation report Camulodonum: First Report on the Excavations at Colchester 1930-39 (an item on our database) as our main source.

The Introduction to Camulodonum provides the staff list for our model. In it, authors Mark Reginald Hull and Christopher Hawkes acknowledge by name a myriad of paid and unpaid men and women who worked on site. We created an item [Excavations at Colchester] and used the Introduction to provide a skeleton staff list and organisational framework for the excavation (Please note: the staff was absolutely larger than the number explicitly named in Hull and Hawkes’s Introduction).

The Introduction names 4 Directors (all men), 21 “voluntary assistants” (11 women and 10 men), and 4 “charge hands” (all men). The men listed as “charge hands” were most likely managing a other men (not named and credited for their labour in the final report) who were undertaking the heavy digging. The “charge hands” and the men who they managed were probably all paid for their work, though only access to the paylists from the excavation will tell us how much.

The Colchester dig was organised by the Colchester Excavation Committee and the Society of Antiquaries Research Committee – we have used a property [organised by] to link to entries for each group. The President of the Colchester Excavation Committee was Annie Pearson, Viscountess Cowdray. She served alongside various Colchester notables, and representatives from the Society of Antiquaries. The Society of Antiquaries Research Committee also provided funding out of their designated pot for the Colchester dig.  

The excavation model that we have used for Colchester is expandable. If, for example, we find the names of other people working (either as paid or unpaid labour) on site, we can add them using the property [member of the excavation team]. We can adjust job titles for any of the individuals listed, should we find more specific information elsewhere. We can add specifics about where people were working within the area being excavated, which could be useful if particular areas of the excavation are now designated archaeological sites with individual entries on Wikidata. If a particular named individual is associated with the discovery of an artefact in a museum collection, and the artefact is discoverable through a museum collection database, we could add a link to the artefact to their entry.

The model works for smaller-scale excavations as well. In 1904, the artist Jessie Mothersole, who is on our database, worked as a “lady artist” copying tomb paintings at Saqqara, Egypt, an ancient Egyptian necropolis and (both then and now) an archaeological site and tourist attraction. We created [Excavations at Saqqara 1] (because there were multiple seasons with slightly different staff) as an item and linked it to her entry. The director of this season at Saqqara was Margaret Murray, whose report on the dig provides details on some staff.  But one of the most valuable sources for outlining the staffing of this excavation is a short article written by Jessie Mothersole for the popular illustrated magazine Sunday at Home.   

In this article, Mothersole outlines that eleven Egyptian men and boys were clearing the tombs (digging out sand) to lay bare the tomb paintings so that they could be copied: “eight basket boys, two turyehs, and a reis”. She does not name any of these men and boys. In order to include them with what little information she provided, we created an item for [name unrecorded] which we could use to indicate the existence of each person, and give them a job title.

There were two Egyptian men that both Mothersole and Murray named in their writings on this season of work at Saqqara: Reis Khalifa and Reis Rubi, two experienced foremen who were based at Saqqara during the time. They were father and son. Both are also mentioned in the Service des Antiquities journal. Mothersole also names the servant who attended the three women on site, Ibrhim Abd-el-Karim. We added him and his job title to the members of the dig team.

We hope that this model for excavations helps to emphasise the critical factor on any dig: people. We may not know who they are, or even what exactly they were doing, but if we view any excavation as an organisation we can begin to give people the credit they are due for their work to reveal the past.

More Working Lives at the Society of Antiquaries

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator)

The Beyond Notability team has been busy going through records at the Society of Antiquaries. Among the lot are the Society’s Council Minute books. Alongside fellowship administration and the scholarly agendas of the day. the Council Minute Books also reflect the day-to-day logistics of running the Society.

Keeping my eye out for mentions of women in the Council Minute books, I came across one woman whose work for the Society was integral to its day-to-day functioning in the Victorian era. This woman is Mrs Baldwinson, who was married to the Society’s Porter, Mr George Baldwinson.

The minute noting her work at the Society was made as part of a Council Meeting in June 1874. George Baldwinson had asked for a raise for himself and his wife (whose first name is, sadly, not recorded), and the minute included information on their work and pay. Mrs Baldwinson’s rate of pay was quarterly, with an annual sum for making tea, in contrast to her husband’s weekly salary. After her death a few years later, a Mrs Knight took over her duties. Another very recent find was a reference to “two girls” (unnamed) who were to help with the Library Catalogue in 1884.

As I tweeted on our launch day, The Antiquaries Journal also includes brief references to other staff who helped the Society function on a day-to-day basis. There we can find acknowledgement of the work of Louisa Hurren, the Society’s housekeeper, who retired in 1945 after 40 years working at the Society.

In 1935, another staff member’s departure was acknowledged in The Antiquaries Journal – this was Miss Warrand, who was leaving the post of ‘Library-cataloguer’ at the Society after 10 years of working. It appears from the Journal that she was one of two cataloguers employed, and that her post was not to be filled because the cataloguing work had been so thoroughly done it was felt that the Society could manage with only one catalogue from that point.

We want to acknowledge the lives and work of these women in the Society’s history, and make sure that their work is recognised alongside the contributions of the Fellows to the Society. We hope that this brief post is a start.

Working with Gwenllian Morgan

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

As a team, we have been talking a lot about work lately. In order to test out our evolving ontology for cataloguing women’s work, we’ve started to create quite detailed entries for a few women in our database. These detailed entries are based on the initial archive research we have done over the past few months, and associated desk-based research in primary and secondary source material. 

Working through the source material and figuring out how to catalogue what we are finding about women’s work most effectively has highlighted the need for us to construct a flexible and contextually relevant framework to represent what can be quite complex forms of activity into statements that work as linked data.  

We are using this framework to reflect the wide range of activities we are seeing in the records. And where possible, we are noting whether or not “positions held” – which we are deliberately separating from employment – are paid or unpaid, with salary specifics where we have them. To that end, we have decided to pull all these together by making a new item “public or professional activity”, each work-related property we create will now be united, and queryable, through the statement that it is an “instance of” a “public and professional activity”. 

Let’s take the example of Gwenllian Morgan, one of the women in our database. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in the 1930s, toward the end of her extremely active life. Her blue paper reflects the wide range of her activities – beginning with her name, after which are the letters J. P., indicating that she was a justice of the peace.  

The “Addition, Profession or Occupation” field on the blue paper reveals that she held the position of Mayor in Brecon, Wales, where she lived, in 1910, and that she was Governor (equivalent to a Trustee position) of the National Library of Wales.  

The “Qualification” field introduces yet more areas of “public and professional” activity that Morgan undertook: her co-founding of the Brecknock Society and Museum, her role as Correspondent (effectively local reporter) in Brecon and district for the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Monuments, and her association with the “restoration” of the Cresset Stone in Brecon Cathedral.  

This last detail took a bit of time and research to unpack. On first glance, it might look like Morgan had a role in conserving the stone, which had been found in a nearby garden. But in fact, courtesy of the National Library of Wales’s digitised newspaper collection, the “restoration” refers to Morgan’s purchase of the stone and (presumably) her donation of it to the Cathedral. As an aside, I’d highly recommend watching this beautiful film of a specially composed piece of music played near the Cresset stone, which is illuminated with candles. 

Turning to secondary source material, we find yet more evidence of Morgan’s activities in local government beyond her positions as J. P. and Mayor as indicated in her blue paper. An article in the Review of Reviews, published to coincide with her inauguration as mayor, notes that she had further positions as a town councillor and a poor law guardian. 

It remains to be seen how far Morgan’s local government work fed into her antiquarian interests. But it is clear that Morgan felt very strongly about championing women’s work in local government. She outlined her thoughts on the matter at a meeting of the National Union of Women Workers, which took place in Manchester in 1895.  Her speech there was published as a pamphlet, which is now accessible through the LSE Women’s Library digital collection.  

Alongside this local work, Morgan took part in national and international campaigns for temperance, holding positions in the World Women’s Christian Temperance Association and the British Women’s Temperance Association in the 1890s. As Superintendent of Petitions and Treaties for the WWCTA, she led on the collection of signatures of Great Britain and Ireland for the Polyglot petition, which called for governments to prevent trade in opium and alcohol. The founder of the WWCTA, Frances E. Willard, noted in her announcement of Morgan’s appointment that Morgan owed the role to her friend Lady Henry Somerset – an indication both of the role of patronage in these appointments and of Morgan’s social network. 

Morgan’s public and professional activities encompass some key areas we are planning to highlight through our database, including the intersection of proto-feminist campaigning with heritage-related and philanthropic activities. We won’t be able to cover every woman in our database in this much detail, but Morgan’s active life gives us a useful template for thinking through how we represent various aspects of women’s work through time.  

References/Further Reading 

Brecon County Times, 1913. Builth Wells Naturalists At the Priory Church, Brecon, 31 July, p 6. 

Chapin, Clara, 1895. Thumb nail sketches of white ribbon women. Chicago: Women’s Temperance Publishing Association. 

Morgan, Gwenllian E. F. 1895. The Duties of Citizenship: The Proper Understanding and Use of the Municipal and Other Franchises for Women. 

Willard, Frances E. 1890. A New World’s Secretary. The Union Signal, 4 December, p. 12. 

Introducing Our Database

Posted on by Amara

We are now three months into Beyond Notability. We gave our first overview presentation of the project at the Society of Antiquaries Christmas Miscellany last month, for which we pulled together some initial findings. It’s the start of a new year, and so it seems an opportune moment to introduce the first iteration of one of the main project outputs: our research database. 

The research database was set up by Co-Investigator James Baker, and currently operates on WbStack, a shared hosting platform for Wikibase sites. You can find it at the web address https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com (though note the address will change in Spring 2022 when we migrate to Wikibase.Cloud, a new service that will be managed and maintained by Wikimedia Deutschland). You can also find a link to it on our website, by clicking on “Database” in the menu. This post will take you through a few key parts of the database at this early stage of its development. Please note:  if you are using Chrome as your browser, you may need to make sure your language settings are set to British English in order to see all the data.  

And so, to begin. At the top of the main page of the database site you will find a short description of the aims of the project. This section also links to our statement of project values, which has a related bibliography. 

Screenshot of the main page of the Beyond Notability project database, Jan 2022.

Below the first section you will find a section called “Where to start”. The links under this section will take you to a list of all the items (currently) in the database, each of which has an individual Q number, the unique identification number for each item. The list includes people, organisations, events, titles, publications and sources, all linked in some way to individual women’s records. You will also find a list of properties in this section. These are words or phrases that allow us to link items together, or qualify information in a given item (with, for example, an approximate date for the information given, or a reference to source material).  

We have begun creating records for women who were proposed as Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries.  For these entries we began by using the information available in one key source for our project, the Certificates of Candidates for Election (also known as “blue papers”). The “blue papers” have been bound into volumes, each volume representing papers from roughly a 10-year period. The volumes are held in the Society of Antiquaries’ archive. Eventually, we intend to add to these entries with information from other sources. 

Scrolling down the page, under the Additional Resources section of the website you will find a link called “Meta“. This will take you to a page where we will be documenting our decision making and our source material. Under the “Item Templates” section is a list of information we will be prioritising in our dataset, and also information we intend not to prioritise. The following section “Key Sources” will link to pages with descriptions of some of the most important sources for our dataset, such as the “blue papers”, with details on why they are useful for our project.  

Let’s look at an individual entry. 

In 1924, the archaeologist Marjerie Venables Taylor became the first woman proposed and elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries through the same route as a man – that is to say, she was proposed by another Fellow and not by the Society’s Council.  We have extracted data from the  “blue paper” for M. V. Taylor (as she was more commonly known) to begin representing Taylor’s life; our current efforts are on our website at this url: https://beyond-notability.wiki.opencura.com/wiki/Item:Q133. This url will be the main ‘address’ for Taylor on our database for the present, and in due course more information from other sources will be added to supplement the information given on Taylor’s “blue paper”.  

Screenshot of the Beyond Notability database entry for Margerie Venables Taylor, Jan 2022.

The box at the top indicates Taylor’s name as it was given on the blue paper. Alternative names are also listed under “also known as”.  The alternative names are important as women frequently appear in different sources with different names (this is particularly true if they were married).  

Below the top box, is the “event” of the proposal, given as a single statement. This includes the property “election to SAL proposed by“, with the name of the person who initially proposed Taylor (who we have assumed is the first signatory on the list) following. The property “evidence (free-text)” is next, enabling us to transcribe of the information on the blue paper. Another property “point in time” is used to indicate the date that the blue paper was submitted. All the people who signed her blue paper are listed with the property “proposed election to SAL signed by“. Each person has been given their own Q number, and are included in the list of “items”. The property “is elected” allows us to indicate whether or not the person was admitted as a Fellow.  The property “evidence (item)” is used where we have created individual items for individual pieces of evidence, such as a job, or a publication, that were used as supporting details for admission to the Fellowship.    

Below this are separate statements with properties to indicate an individual’s sex/gender, whether or not they are already included in Wikidata, whether they have been given a person ID by the Archaeology Data Service (which links to a list of their publications), their residence including locality (given in the blue paper), employment or degree information.  

The information given in the blue papers can sometimes be difficult to isolate as an item. In Taylor’s case, while there was specific information about the positions she held at the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, there was also an explicit statement about her “distinguished service to the study of Roman Britain”. To capture this more ambiguously framed but important information, we have created a free-text property called “area of expertise“.  Each of the statements described above has been given a reference, using the property “stated in“, which links to the item “Society of Antiquaries Certificates of Candidates for Election“. 

There are currently three statements on Taylor’s page that do not come from her blue paper, and they show the potential for adding information from other sources to enrich the data given in the blue papers. Two of these – “described at URL” and “Archaeology Data Service person ID” – link outward to other websites that describe Taylor’s life and work in the form of statements, connecting our data to those sites, and enabling cross-referencing and querying. The third uses the property “member of” to indicated that Taylor sat on the (item) “Society of Antiquaries Research Committee“. This information has come from another recently added item, the publication “Camulodonum: The First Report of the Excavations at Colchester“. This excavation was conducted in the 1930s as a collaboration between the Society of Antiquaries (through the Research Committee) and the (item) “Colchester Excavation Committee“. Creating the publication as an item enables us to use it as a reference for the work of other women mentioned in the report. From the “Camulodonum” item, you can use “what links here” on the left-hand menu to see the other women included in the report. Some of these women were proposed and elected as Fellows in the years that followed. We will be adding their blue papers in the months to come. 

Detail from Margerie Venables Taylor’s page showing the what links here link (see bottom left hand corner), Jan 2022.

We hope that this post will help you navigate our database site, which grows larger every day. This site is a work in progress, and the ways in which we are cataloguing the data will change as we continue discussing, thinking about and analysing the records. We encourage all of you to take a look at the women we’ve already been able to represent with the data available to us to date. And we hope that you enjoy engaging with the data as much as we do. 

Gertrude Rachel Levy in the Archives

Posted on by Amara

By Amara Thornton (Co-Investigator, Beyond Notability)

My first guest post for the project is on Gertrude Rachel Levy (1883-1966) who was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1947, while she was working as Librarian of the Hellenic & Roman Societies in London. I focus on her work in the 1920s and 30s in Mandate Palestine and Iraq, and spent a morning in the archive of the Palestine Exploration Fund to track her down, coming across many other women in archaeology, history and heritage along the way! “Gertrude Rachel Levy in Mandate Palestine” is published on the Institute of Classical Studies blog.